Snare School Episode 5 Kill Poles and Lethal Snares

hey fellas me trapper here and welcome to the final episode in snare school today we're going to talk about kill poles and lethal or dispatch snares now normally a snare by itself is not a lethal set when the animals caught they're basically like a dog on a choke chain when they pull the snare tightens up when they stop pulling it stops tightening there are times however when you want your snare to be a lethal set if you will remember when we talked about cable diameter the smaller diameter cable that you use the harder it is for the animal to see so it's easier to make the catch but at the same time when you're using a small diameter cable it makes it easier for the animal to chew out so if you're snaring something like a coyote which is a strong strong wheeled animal that's going to fight like crazy if you use a small diameter cable so that it's easy to catch and it's not going to take him long to chew out of that cable and escape so the idea is is you want to provide some entanglement vertical entanglement and what that will do is that will let the coyote wrap up and he will end up choking himself out in my area as you can see it's heavily wooded and so there are trees all over the place but there are situations in areas where you don't have that luxury for instance you can see behind me I'm on a power cut if I were going to set a snare out here on a power cut there's no place for it to tangle up for the animal to tangle up there are people that are trapping farm land if you're snaring a cornfield there's going to be all kind of critters going in and out of that cornfield and there aren't any trees growing in the middle of the cornfield so there's no way to tangle the animal up a lot of guys are in Prairie States or states like South Dakota where it's it's wide open so what you have to do in those cases in order to dispatch the animal is you have to provide your own in and that is what we call a kill pole and they're normally made out of a piece of rebar and if you're going after an animal like a coyote please take my advice use 5/8 inch rebar don't go 1/2 inch rebar don't go 3 eighth-century bar and you're going to need a piece of rebar that's five feet long because you're going to have to hammer it into the ground a considerable distance to make it firm enough to withstand the coyote fighting until he tangles up and expires so anyway let's take a look and I'll show you what one of these things looks like you know what we've got here is a small creek bed that's running through the middle of this power cut out into the other side and if I wanted to snare this area right in here there's not going to be any place for any entanglement there are no trees nearby nothing that the animal can wrap up on so he's going to end up if I just had a snare here with the support once he's caught he's going to make a tremendous burn circle where he's going to go around and around and around and around he's going to destroy this entire area and then he has a good chance of chewing the cable and escaping so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a kill Pole right there that's a 5 foot pole rebar pole and you can see it's got a piece of number nine wire just tack welded to it and that's going to be my snare support and then I have a washer tack welded to the top of the pole to attach my snare and so all I'm going to do is I'm simply going to take that support wire extend it out hang my snare on it and then clip my snare on the top of the washer so let me get it set up okay so I've got my pole driven in the ground and my number nine wires right here the next thing is I'm going to take my snare and in this case there's nothing to clip off to out here so I'm going to drive my snare into the ground using an earth anchor now if you've got a really good connection you can use this kill pole as the anchor for your snare as well as the kill pole so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a driver and I'm going to drive this snare anchor into the ground and then I'm going to use the pole as my support and the rap object so let me get that taken care of okay now that I've got my snare anchored let me get my wire adjusted my support wire gonna need that about right there and get my loop use about a 12 inch loop there there we go get that up and that is just just about perfect right there now this is a handy trick sometimes you can get an entire clod of dirt with the grass attached and that allows you to plant wherever you want just like that there we go don't want to fence it in too much now at this point everything is set my snare is anchored into the ground I've got my kill pole driven in number nine wire is supporting the snare and what will happen is this when the coyote comes through and he gets caught in the snare he's going to start struggling and what happens is is he wraps around this pole until he gets caught right up around his neck and he'll asphyxiate himself now to state the obvious once again your kill pole is going to have to be extremely stout it's going to be driven in the ground good and hard it's got to be able to withstand a Cody fighting at it and it also has to be higher than the head level of whatever animal you're snaring so if you're sneering kun and using a kill pole you can probably get away with a three-foot-tall kill pole because that three-foot-tall is going to be higher than the Coons head but when you're dealing with an animal like a coyote or a fox you need to get a five-foot pole you need to have it four feet up in the air three and a half feet up in the air the idea is that pole has to be higher than the animal's head because you want that animal basically hanging when he starts fighting and he starts jumping you want him to wrap around that pole so that it gets his front feet up off the ground and then he basically hangs himself and that's the idea behind a lethal snare so basically that's the skinny on what a kill pole is and why you would want to use it and the basics on how to use one personally I'm not big on them to me snaring is something that is lightweight it's simple requires few tools few accessories and we start introducing kill poles and you start toting rebar around especially the thick 5/8 inch diameter rebar the weight and the size of your stuff adds up quick and in my opinion you might as well just go ahead and start lugging footholds around for all that it's worth but it is important to understand the difference between a cable restraint and a lethal dispatch snare a cable restraint is basically a device it's a snare and it's specifically designed so that there is no way that anything can entangle on it there's no trees around there's nothing that the snare can reach and it's designed to prevent the animal from choking itself out in case you have a non-target catch one other option to make your snares lethal is to use a kill spring and a kill spring like you can see in this picture is just a small spring that fits behind the snare lock and it exerts a constant pressure on the lock so that there's no way it can relax some people use kill Springs some people use kill poles a lot of it depends upon your area and what's legal in your area personally since I'm not a predator trapper I'm a water trapper and also since I'm a food trapper I try and keep my animals especially the beaver alive I want to dispatch them when I get there so I know how long they've been dead but that's not the case for everybody and a good snare man should know how to keep his catch alive and he should know how to dispatch it quickly and cleanly even when he's not there and so that's where your kill Springs and your kill poles come into play anyway I hope this series has been of value if there's interest I was thinking about doing a series on body grip traps maybe Conibear school and maybe something similar on leg-hold traps like I say this is nothing Vance it's nothing encyclopedia this is just the basics to take you from knowing very little about a subject to knowing a fairly good bit about it so I hope you've enjoyed it hope it was about you and we'll see you next time thanks for watching

Channel: The Meat Trapper

Views: 142,747

Rating: 4.7607603 out of 5

Keywords: beaver trapping, how to catch beavers, survival trapping, snaring, survival snaring, how to build a snare, prepper, meat trapping, trapping for meat, how to catch food, how to snare rabbits, how to trap turtles, trapping snapping turtles, how to catch turtles, how to catch snappers

Id: cT5dCrh9-O0

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2015